Pat Metheny Group
We Live Here

Before I proceed to denigrate this work by the P.M.G., produced in 1995, a small introduction is necessary.

I would like to judge the depth of the album starting from its content, and not from the astronomical value of those who play on it. Yes, because I absolutely do not want to question the worth of the leader Pat Metheny, nor that of his highly skilled longtime friend and collaborator, Lyle Mays, with whom he has integrated perfectly for more than twenty years.

This CD should be classified as Fusion. Do you know what fusion is? It's that musical genre derived from jazz, which takes advantage of the abilities of excellent musicians who know what improvisation is, who were the protagonists of the Old School; they could interpret it, reprising it, but it seems that from the '70s, there was a tendency to let themselves be contaminated by technology, by desires for modernism, by distant and foreign sounds, perhaps also to brush off the fatigue phase that be bop (a too elitist and fashionable genre?!?) offered.

Do you know who made fusion great? Mind you, I said MADE, and not overdone (just like this work by the pmg): the Weather Report (with Pastorius, Shorter,) or the Steps Ahead with Brecker (incidentally, a close friend of our Pat). But these absurd myths have ended. They ended because they had to end. The genre died in the 1980s, everything was said.

The P.M.G. rode the wave of fusion for years, and did so well, but the works proposed after the successful "Letter from Home" leave some doubts.

Firstly, and now let's move on to the album in question, the frantic search for new sounds, rhythms, choruses, all things considered, we do not reach the madness of "Quartet" or "Imaginary Day", but we face an evident mix of curious, dominant rhythms. Let me explain.

I use this term, dominant, to highlight that unfortunately the motive revolves around the rhythms and not vice versa, and this is a blatant creative limit.

Paul Wertico, the percussionist, fulfills his small task, which borders on the trivial. Pat's verticalizations, the improvisations, have almost zero depth, they are often weak, unrecognizable. Mays, the keyboardist, tries to give energy and depth with his creamy sound, and at times he even succeeds.

The choristers are likable; in a couple of pieces, they are practically the protagonists of an almost ephemeral track, "And then I knew", which is probably the best track on the album.

"Here To Stay" lasts too long and goes nowhere, too much time to say too little. The rhythm is tiring, lacks depth, the melody is ineffective. "The Girl Next Door" is sly, there’s a delightful and melancholic trumpet solo by Ledford that saves the mess.

"We Live Here", track five, is even bothersome, probably successful because it wants to reproduce the chaos of a metropolis, with the lively and inhuman noises of modern life. For Pat, fusion has always been something multiethnic, colorful, but that damned synth that approximates the sound of a trumpet is as flat, pallid, and banal as he dares to continue reproducing, in several tracks and, naturally, in more fusion albums.

"Red Sky" must be one of the pieces for which Pat still feels affection, as he reprised it years later by revisiting and adapting it for contemporary jazz.

An album to be considered marginally, whose commercial and historical value are decidedly negligible.